Born in Kapuskasing, Canada in 1954, James Cameron moved around several times before moving to Orange County, California. He attended Fullerton College to study physics, but later switched majors to English literature. He dropped out of college and married a waitress named Sarah, who he supported by driving trucks. It was the release of "Star Wars" in the summer of 1977 that got him moving on his film career. "That was the movie I really wanted to make. After seeing that movie I got really determined. I decided to get busy". he spent a lot of time in the University of Southern California's library. He read everything he could get his hands on, including favorite movies' scripts, to books on visual effects. He also studied the art of screen writing. Cameron then got a job at New World Pictures, run by B-Movie king Roger Corman. Many Oscar-winning filmmakers started out this way. Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, and Jonathan Demme all made their first movies with Corman. Cameron entered the Corman movie factory in 1979, as a miniature model maker for "Battle Beyond the Stars." During the production, Cameron impressed Corman with his initiative and ingenuity at doing impressive things with special effects without any experience. Cameron went on to do the visual effects of "Escape From New York," and then "Galaxy Of Terror" before being asked to direct his first motion picture, "Piranha 2: The Spawning." A forgettable film that Cameron was given little control over by the Italian producers. He was not allowed to see the dailies or to have final cut, but despite this he threw himself wholeheartedly into it, as he does with all his films. Two good things came out of this. It gave him insight on the challenges of directing a movie. The other came while he was in Rome trying to get the producers to give him final cut. He was flat broke in a hotel, and had a bad case of the flu. One night he had a fever dream about a metal skeleton with no legs pulling itself across the kitchen floor with knives after a women who could not get away because she was injured. This fever dream became the film that made him, "The Terminator." Since then his films have won 18 Academy Awards and grossed over 2 billion dollars worldwide. He has directed "The Terminator"(1984), "Aliens"(1986), "The Abyss"(1989), "Terminator 2:Judgment Day"(1991), "True Lies"(1994), and "Titanic"(1997), the most popular movie of all time.

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Joshua's James Cameron Page-Great site.

Amazing James Cameron Page